[Groff] revisited: vertical text turned by 90 degree

[Ralph Graulich]

Hi everyone,

several months ago I asked about having text vertically aligned and turned
by 90 degrees. Several helpful answers reached me and I thought about
writing another small "how to". Despite the fact that I tried many
proposed solutions, none of them worked the way I wanted it to work. This
is quite fine for me, as those solutions provided many interesting
insights.

However, I am still stuck with my first problem:

(1)     Both the troff source file as well as the PDF file can be found
at:
        http://www.shauny.de/computer/unix/anleitungen/troff/problems/

(2)     The string "Adjani" has to horizontally and vertically centered
within the table's first column; the string will consist of one or two
lines depending on what data is given.

I tried with various amounts of moving and spacing, however I don't get it
right, no matter how hard I try, without destroying the fixed column
widths of the other columns. If I move it too far (forcing it to have a
noticable visual difference), the other columns alignment gets garbled.

(add.: for those who want to know a bit about the background - those
documents will be dynamically generated from a database with the help of
PHP, so web visitors can download the web page as a PDF file on the fly,
for better printing and viewing. The whole backend works, just the layout
causes headaches...)

The promised how-to will be written, as soon as I got all the problems
solved, cause half way how-tos seem to be pretty useless ;-)

Any good ideas?

Kind regards
... Ralph ...